How JMarketing Uses Teamwork to Manage a Remote Team Across 16 Countries
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JMarketing is a multi-award winning global digital agency with clients and staff spanning five continents. They specialize in helping their clients create high-converting landing pages and ads using psychology to influence consumer-decision making. Through the use of psychology in their storytelling and conversion-focused UX techniques, they help clients elevate their digital marketing methodology and achieve their growth goals.
Because their team is scattered throughout the globe and tasked with managing a broad scope of project types, they require very strategic management. Each day, they have to collectively keep track of a variety of team members, stakeholders, demands, conversations, and tasks. Without an organized system, this balancing act could easily turn into a cumulative mess.
After years of using clunky management tools, JMarketing came across Teamwork through a much-needed recommendation. Now, they use the software to manage their remote team and happy clients all around the world.
"Teamwork is all about centralization of information and clarity and visibility with our customers. It gives them visibility into the project and it centralizes information so that myopia can't kick in. There's always very, very clear information structures available.”
Connecting Up the Dots
Why JMarketing needed a tool like Teamwork
JMarketing’s clients end up staying for the long haul. Some just require web hosting, others tap into the team’s SEO expertise, while even more need a one-off project, like a targeted landing page or a homepage optimization. Wherever the client comes from and whatever project they kick off with, they almost always turn into a retainer.
The team desperately needed a place to keep track of all their different projects, regardless of the size, length, and cost. They knew that retainers are often difficult to manage with a standard project management solution, so they were in need of something a bit more flexible and robust.
Avoid juggling third-party add-ons
Before Teamwork, JMarketing used Basecamp, but they soon found it wasn’t powerful enough for their needs.
“Anytime I wanted to do something more, I needed an add-on and I had to pay for it or make it a third-party system to jerry-rig together. It was just a pain.” says Josh.
Soon after they were recommended Teamwork, JMarketing was set up and ready-to-go with the software. Moving everything across was simple using the Basecamp importer, which pulls all data and projects straight into Teamwork, and the videos and help docs made it easy to onboard new clients.
Tracking multiple moving parts
How JMarketing use Teamwork
JMarketing exclusively uses Teamwork for their project and team needs. First clients are added to a CRM. Then, Josh and the team can follow the lead, track communication, and manage signed-off projects through Teamwork.
Next up, clients are onboarded to Teamwork so they can collaborate with the team in one place. Every new customer gets a project folder that comes equipped with handy templates.
"We have everything templated out and, by everything, I mean the design tasks, the development tasks, the administration, even the onboarding for the client. We have a template with the messages we’re going to send them to onboard them, as well as our own training videos of how to use Teamwork.” says Josh.
Setting up new projects is a breeze. The JMarketing team simply creates a templated project after a deal is signed and the tasks get automatically populated.
Creating a robust centralized solution for client and team collaboration
Now, JMarketing insists that all their clients maintain communications through Teamwork in their dedicated project folder. Obviously, not everyone wants to play ball, but Josh and the team can simply copy and paste emails into Teamwork and respond directly from there.
“What we love about Teamwork is the fact that we don’t need clients to log in. We don’t need them to care. All we need them to do is use their very basic email,” says Josh.
This avoids any confusion later down the line. For example, if a marketing manager leaves a company halfway through a project, everyone can still access all communication without having to sift through hundreds of emails.
JMarketing makes good use of Teamwork Chat, too, and they’ve just started to dabble with the new video feature. This helps store information from different projects all in one place regardless of the format the information is in.
“I can set up folders just for the finance team or whoever and it’s game-changing. Everything is connected to the project and the customer, and I can set my tasks in it immediately,” adds Josh.
After years of setting up clients as “Collaborators” in the tool (which gives them controlled access to Teamwork), JMarketing is now moving towards using our new user type “Client User”. This provides much more flexibility for clients that want to be proactively involved.
JMarketing’s favorite Teamwork features
Templates for tasks and time management
Time tracking
Easy time management
“For various projects where I’ve noticed that we’re chewing up time with clients in unexpected areas, I can both in real-time and retrospectively go back and tag each of the time elements so I can sum it up and know that this problem wasted a ton of time,” says Josh.
Managing a scattered team while cutting costs
What JMarketing has achieved by using Teamwork
Easily managing a remote team across 16 countries
Cutting overheads to 20% of what they previously were
Signing huge deals with happy retainer clients
Going from a big serviced office in Melbourne to remote working was a breeze for JMarketing thanks to Teamwork.
Josh can now manage staff working from 16 different countries. Through Teamwork’s features, he can manage the entire workflow, from monitoring their time and projects to processing payments in 16 different currencies, and fostering communication across various time zones.
Running the team remotely like this means JMarketing’s overhead costs are now 20% of what they used to be.
It helps with the client side of things, too. Having all project collateral, workflows, assets, and messaging in one place means no tasks slip through the gaps and no deadlines are missed.
It also empowers clients to get involved in their own projects. Several of JMarketing’s clients have fallen in love with Teamwork and have started setting their own tasks through the tool. In fact, JMarketing signed their biggest deal ever with a client that was particularly enamored with Teamwork’s project management capabilities.
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